and brushed. It's a very dusty trip up here. I will tell you when dinner is ready." She gave him a long, doubtful look in which she somehow expressed a wish that he had not persuaded her to entertain him, then turned away, softly shutting the door.
Left alone, Carron let his gun cases slip to the floor. "Of all extraordinary places!" he thought, but then he looked around the room and smiled. It was of a piece with a little hall below. He suspected. its kinship to the gaunt, white gate-posts. It was naïve, ornate, somewhat worn, yet with an amusing air of being grand. He felt a charm in it in spite of the jig-saw carvings—or possibly because of them. His eyes lingered at the mantelpiece, of most astonishing flourishes, appreciated the landscape painted on the foot of the bed, moved with quickness across the light, blank walls, and inadvertently caught sight of himself in a mirror.
He thought he could understand his landlady's hesitation now. "Takes me for a burglar rather poorly disguised," he reflected. In the excitement of his arrival he had forgotten his appearance as well as his fatigue. Now he abandoned his outer garments to the banisters of the hall, and in a few minutes rolled into cold water as a fish to its native element. The weariness of twenty-four hours' activity, the exhaustion of body, of brain and
21
